January 26, 2017 | 6 min read

How to Clean Your Mac in 5 Easy Steps

Junk Cleanup

Do you know what is junk? This is some sort of trash that is produced by apps, big files, temporary files, and other products of your Mac OS activity. These files not only clutter but also slow down the system. Furthermore, while freeing up the space on the hard drive, the Mac OS does not actually remove the files - instead, it moves them to iCloud. That’s why there are many reasons for regular cleanups of your Mac OS.

As for manual removal of junk, we strictly don’t recommend doing this. First of all, every app on your Mac stores junk as it wishes. It means that junk files may be everywhere in system folders, and you will spend hours looking for them.

Furthermore, why would you need to delete them manually if dozens of third-party apps can do this in few minutes? MacKeeper offers a full set of cleaning features, including junk cleanup.

Log Files Cleanup

Almost the same happens to the logs files on your Mac. These files are produced by the Mac OS and may be really useful for developers. But in most cases log files pile up on your Mac and take up a lot of space. And when log files take too much space, the Mac OS moves them to iCloud. The end is the same as with junk files.

In case with log files, the situation is simpler than with junk files. Almost all logs are stored in the same place. To remove them:

Press Shift-Command-G.

Copy and paste the way to the log files ~/Library/Logs, and then press Go.

Press Command-A, then Command-Backspace.

Restart your Mac.

Duplicates and Leftovers Cleanup

Before we explain how to clean up large and old files on your Mac, let’s see how to deal with smaller ones, such as duplicates and leftovers. Your Mac stores dozens of duplicates, cache files, and old files that you don’t need. It would be tough to discover these files on your Mac and remove them manually. That is another case when you should use third-party apps. MacKeeper cleans leftovers and duplicates in few clicks:

Launch MacKeeper and go to Duplicates Finder.

Start the scan.

Select all items that you want to remove.

The same way you can remove the leftovers on your Mac. MacKeeper notifies the users if any leftovers remain after an app is deleted.

Hard Drive Cleanup

Firstly, check how full is your storage:

Go to Apple menu > About This Mac.

Go to the Storage tab and examine what exactly takes more space on your Mac.

You can also remove large and old files manually, but it takes time. Make sure that you store only the apps that you use. If you store too many photos, move them to iCloud. If you store too much music and videos, you can either move them to iCloud or backup them to an external device.

RAM Cleanup

Since everything is online, the RAM is always overloaded. When you watch a movie online, listen to music online and work with intensive apps, your Mac uses the RAM all the time. Imagine how it’s overloaded when you do all of this at the same time. MacKeeper Memory Cleaner allows to clean the RAM with just a single click.